Emailing QuickBooks Files

Let’s say you need to get a copy of your QuickBooks file to your bookkeeper…or business partner…or CPA. Easy, you say. Just attach it to an email.

Stop!

You should consider a couple of things first.

1. Security. Sending and receiving email is not the most secure thing to do on the internet. If your email account gets hacked, of if your email receipient’s email gets hacked, you don’t want your QuickBooks file sitting out there for the taking. And you don’t want your file to sit out there in someone’s inbox forever either.

It’s more secure to use a file sharing or file sending service. Services like sharefile.com, yousendit.com, sendthisfile.com, and others have secure means of sending files. Most of these services allow you put an ‘expiration date’ on the file you send, so it will automatically go offline after a week or two. That’s a good thing.

Or, if you have a cloud-based drive you can share, like IDrive, you can securely upload a backup of your file and give access to someone else.

2. Efficiency. Attaching large files to emails is not very efficient; email wasn’t designed to carry heavy data loads. If the file you attach to your email is bigger than, say, 10MB, it may fail to send at all, or may not be receivable on the other side.

Even if you create a portable copy of your data — which would be perhaps only 20% the size of your regular QBW file — most company’s files are still going to be too big to reliably send by email.

Keep it secure, and keep it efficient when you transfer someone your QuickBooks data.

How about you? What’s the best method you’ve found to send someone a QuickBooks file?